Some of the most valuable of a business's intangible assets fall within the domain of “marketing:” relationships with reliable materiel and service providers, customer data, trademarks, marketing materials, internal and external business procedures and systems, and other kinds of know-how. Unpacking these categories, one finds myriad different issues, ranging from a distinct logo design and other trade and service marks to knowledge of the most useful customer data and demographic trends. Each individual company generally develops such intangible assets through a mix of borrowing from known models and researching and developing its own home-grown solutions. The purpose of the present invention is to provide a tool to help with both kinds of development, particularly in the initial stages when a new company is simply overwhelmed by the number of tasks to be completed and the paucity of skilled staff available to address them.
The business world is full of companies who sell assistance of one form or another to help start-ups build and implement a marketing system. The ones that leverage Internet technology effectively, generally have a narrow (vertical) product-oriented focus that requires the user to employ many such services to fulfill all of his/her requirements. Examples of these are:
A database service provider may offer online tools for customer relationship development and management, tasks lists. Generally, these consist of blank boxes that provide none of the intelligence or content required to make them useful; for example, customer and prospect lists.
A printing service may provide templates for brochures, stationery, and promotional items and even artwork, fonts, and such. A printer may offer tools to allow a business customer to design right on an Internet browser, selecting clip art, adding text content, and uploading images to be printed. But the services offer little help in creating content of selecting a “look” because the intelligence is limited to template groupings, such as layouts by industry.
An interactive image display system may display printed publications and provide a user interface to create and modify them. The system may provide batch printing and may be implemented through an interactive web site allowing users to design and order printed materials such as business cards, wedding invitations, and bar mitzvah invitations. U.S. Pat. No. 6,529,214, filed May 14, 1999.
Retailers may provide cross-selling pages. For example, when a user buys a product, information about that user, such as what s/he searched for, decided to buy, bought previously, etc. may be used with collaborative filtering to make recommendations for future purchases. In a sense, the software stands in the shoes of a salesperson who garners knowledge from different sources to sell to a consumer. Such a technique may displace the need for some kinds of know-how.
A graphic art company may do design work through an Internet portal by obtaining a profile generated by a customer and then having graphic artists do design work behind the scenes. This is basically the same service a store-front might provide, except that the Internet is used to keep prices low. Profiling may take account of: the company name, preferred symbols, slogans, colors, an abstract by the customer explaining what the company and anything that makes it unique and examples of graphics liked and disliked by the customer.
An online service may filter their sales lead data according to preferences defined by their customers and sell the resulting lists to the customer for a per-record fee. Generally the more tailored the list, the more expensive. Such services may also provide facilities for direct e-mail marketing. Criteria may include geographic location, industry, size, special data, and target job title, for example.
Email marketing services including facilities for updating and maintaining the integrity of opt-in email lists. Clients can host their own lists on a service's server and the server will automate the processes of mailing and maintenance of the list.
Web site integration: Some web ISPs have integrated their services to provide more comprehensive value added services including design of the site, prepackaged promotion templates (based on web advertising and email), labor-intensive content creation such as Flash® media, promotion in search engines, email marketing along with traditional hosting services. Web-Based Sales Lead and Marketing Programs (i.e. promotions and sweepstakes)
Application development tools for creating business model applications that rely on heavily on network and Internet services may exploit templates that carry some degree of “business intelligence” in the degree of differentiation among the templates.
Business documents may be purchased from a vendor with an online library organized by different categories of businesses. For example, the library may contain basic business plans, employee handbooks, mission statements, documentation, procedure manuals, MIS tools, etc. These need to be modified by the purchaser to fit them to the specifics of the client's business.
Web hosting services often provide facilities for the creation and maintenance of mailing lists and for the use of them to send newsletters. But these services do not include services related to content creation. Many web hosting services also provide customizable web site templates.
In another prior art area, computer systems are used to support collaborating parties using network-linked computer terminals. For example, the parties may be a salesperson and a sales prospect, where the system allows the parties to present the optional features of, and discuss, an article for purchase.
Many prior art software systems have been proposed to support collaboration between parties. In fact a term of art, “collaborationware” has been coined to identify this class of software. One class of collaborationware helps businesspersons and/or technical personnel work together on sets of information. These sets of information range from complex legal contracts to the design of a jet. Such systems are generally shells that support the sharing of all sorts of desired information. For example, application files such as spreadsheets and documents can be modified and revisions of these saved for analysis.
A common feature of such systems is support for live interaction. Features such as chat “environments” and whiteboards allow participants who are geographically separate to interact and share information. The present invention falls into this genre, but is tailored for a specific purpose, which is to facilitate the sale of something where the parties include a sales prospect (or repeat customer) and a salesperson. A brief review of related art follows.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,944,791 describes a system with a pilot computer terminal and a passenger computer terminal. The pilot computer controls the downloading of web pages to the passenger terminals. The system allows the content to be “sanitized” in the process. Content comes from various web pages. The facility does not include any particular content other than that to support the process of piloting (and passengering).
U.S. Pat. No. 5,951,652 describes a method of synchronizing data from web pages between terminals.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,951 describes a system to allow networked users to collaborate in decision making. Members share proposals and comment on them and the system keeps track of the proposals, responsive comments, and revisions to the proposals, and shares them among the group.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,144,991 describes a system that defines a guide and a client who interact on a real-time basis over the Internet. The guide has a special browser that displays locally and remotely displayable frames. The client has a standard browser. The remotely displayable frames are shown on both terminals synchronously. The guide selects available Web data, for example when a client requests it by transmitting a request (e.g., by a chat window) and the guide loads the requested data into the conventional browser. The client and guide can share a pointer and whiteboard. In addition, the guide and client can interact with a shared pointer and a shared whiteboard. Moreover, the guide can record the live session for later playback by other clients. Also, a plurality of clients may be simultaneously interacting with the guide and each other.
The patent describes a sales and marketing environment where a user can get personal assistance in finding information on a Web site. A real-time, interactive session is constructed that allows the client to ask questions (with a chat window) and the salesperson shows the client web content. The salesperson and user can share collaborationware tools and facilitate the user making a purchase.
A network-based design system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,247,011 entitled “Computerized Prepress”. The patent describes a document authoring tool that is downloaded from a server to a client browser. The design created in the client is uploaded to the server where it is processed by a translation program into a prepress printing file format.
Another system is disclosed in co-pending and co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,433 entitled “Managing Print Jobs”. The system discloses an editor for creating and editing designs in the client browser. The system provides access to a number of pre-configured templates that can be customized.
US Pat. Publication No. 2004/0085330 describes a network-based design tool with graphical components of a face, arranged in tab-accessible groups, that may be assembled to create caricatures. A client browser can use the interface in a client-server configuration and the result can be printed at the server side.
Other client-server applications that allow graphical designs, such as business cards, to be created, using a thin-client editor, and ordered from a printer associated with the server are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,631,375, US Pat. Publication No. 2004/0190011, and US Pat. Publication No. 2004/0000246. In these documents, batches of product based on the design can be ordered immediately upon completion of the design from the same entity—printer—hosting the server and making the design software available.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,240,444 describes a system in which multiple terminals share view the same web content synchronously using browsers. Messages are also shared.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,365 describes a system with a pilot terminal which controls the browser of one or more passenger terminals. The pilot and passenger terminals use a piece of software in addition to a browser, such as an applet. The pilot terminal initiates the loading of web content on the pilot and passenger terminals. This may facilitate discussion of the same content during a conference call. The pilot transmits a URL to a control site, which retrieves the web content. The control site may remove or modify the content (“sanitize”) and cause the passenger terminal's control software to download the resulting content. Links in the content sent by the control site to the pilot are modified to cause them to invoke further content through the control site so the filtering process keeps repeating.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,295,551 describes a call center system that allows a representative and a user to jointly browse Web content while conversing in real time. A user may initiate the session by accessing a web page associated with the call center. A call center server downloads a user applet to the user's computer. An applet on the user's computer communicates state information the browser display the server. A service applet creates a service view that includes the user view and a control for the representation of the user view. A representative may alter the user view by operating web controls. The service applet communicates the state changes to the server and the user's applet polls the server to update the user view correspondingly. The user applet also conveys state information to the representative computer's so it can show the user's view appropriately. Multiple users and multiple representatives may conduct a single conference in this way.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,345,239 describes a system for demonstrating business capabilities. Data is organized in a demonstration format and transmitted over the network in that format to other sites. The system supports real time information sharing and various embodiments are described.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,611,822 describes a goal based learning system that employs an expert system to distribute rule-based educational content. The system generates a simulated environment through a collaborative training session over a network. The system allows application sharing, whiteboarding, media sharing, newsgroup information sharing, chatroom initiation and discussion group initiation.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,668,273 describes a collaborative web browsing session system that allows a presenter to direct audio and visual components of a browser on other computers. An attendee logs into a control site computer and relinquishes web browser control to the presenter. The session created by the presenter is witnessed by the attendee. The presentation includes a predetermined set of web pages and slides. A region of the presenter's display may be added to the content viewed by the attendee. To do this, the presenter captures the part of the screen (“screen grab”) and transmits it to the attendee. The content is transmitted via a control site, not directly,